Food and cooking

Contents

Do the twenty-somethings of QC not cook? Apparently not, to judge from the 11 years of Questionable Content. Out of some perverse curiosity, I went through all 2780 comics to date, leaving out any guest comics, Sweet-Tits, Yelling Bird and the turkeys, and confined myself to looking for food in people’s homes. No take-out or delivery, no meals eaten out, and no liquor or beer. I did, however, include food or ingredients that characters specifically mentioned as being in the dwelling, even if it wasn’t shown. And I included foods not eaten, like Pintsize’s cake batter, or the emergency bags of frozen peas.

Carrot cake, pies, cookies, pancakes, and marinara seemed to be the only recipe-type cooked foods the main characters cooked. Meals, in the usual sense, were either eaten out or else made by an older generation (Emily’s or Dora’s parents, for example.)

The main characters are, when not drinking beer or hard liquor, practically swimming in coffee. Marigold must drink energy drinks, because there is almost always a can on her dresser and I refuse to believe that, post-Hannelore, it is the same one for weeks on end.

In the morning, milk, juice and cereal are the norm. Ice cream and cookies are on hand for emotional emergencies, popcorn for movie nights, and peanut butter and bread for a quick filler meal. But stews, soups, roasts, potato salad, vegetables, all the usual cooking type foods are never shown, much less cooked.

This means that each character probably eats out or orders food in not less than once a day, at a probable cost of $15 per day, or about $5,500 a year. Yikes! It's a clear example of the Improbable Food Budget trope.

This was an exercise in perseverance above and beyond common sense, but since it’s now done, I may as well make it available to others. Enjoy, or whatever.